You know how a kid that can barely see the top of the counter and reaches up and over to get something, or remember when you were that short and had that same trouble. That's what the woman was doing cutting my hair so I asked her, "is this as low as this chair will go?" and she said, "yes" and pulled back her hands, stopped, and looked at eyes in the mirror, "you are the only person who noticed that. pause. other people notice that I come in too close, but you noticed that I'm having trouble. My arm hurt." I told her I'd sit on a box. Or maybe a regular chair would be better and she said, nah. But thereafter she gave me the most attentive haircut that I've had in a long time. Which I could do without, actually, because it takes longer and I'm antsy, but the way she blended I noticed was quite skillful. She took her time getting everything right, just so, with razor perfection, hot foam, scrapping razor, then cleaning that up and getting down to the cleaning up all the little itty bitty microscopic nuances that will grow out by tomorrow, and creating gooseflesh with something on the back of my neck in a spot right there, and then right next to that there, and there, the little scamp, and then there and there all the way across like she was playing with my neck creating a path of gooseflesh, and I'm liking this Munchkin and I'm sensing that she likes me. As I'm leaving she has me shake her tiny doll-like hand, again, shaking hands with doll-like women is strange innit but it was unnecessary, that hanging around at the end, and her giving me a card to the place that I already go but now this card has her name on it in GREAT BIG LETTERS.

The other way to view this is through the prism of "living freely through writing"--in which case, OF COURSE Althouse isn't going to just wait around. The philosophy isn't "living freely through waiting around [until someone else says something I can react to]," after all, and never has it been.

This is absurd. I just now made a run to the grocery store to get one of those little suet-seed block thing with the little hanging cages for them. Lord, look at me. Am I turning into my mum?

* drums fingers *

Fine then. A run now because now I've been able to see the little birdies are a family of two noisy kids. They hung around for a long time coming back and forth today, the same family.

I'm turning into an ornithologist. The baby birds chirp in the immediate presence of a parent but they are silent when the parent is out of sight. Their whole body squeezes for a chirp but they cannot vocalize a proper chirp, and they chirp continuously when a parent is within one inch, it comes out a protochirp. A wrong sounding chirp. They both chirp wrongly in different ways and that is how they can be told apart. I noticed this in one minute.

The absurd part is I did that so the suet block will be there when the birds wake up this morning and I must admit that is a bit insane.

Here's a thing about the birds that kills me and it's ordinary but it still kills me anyway.

They spill their seeds near the edge of the balcony. We're way up here. It's scary looking down over the rail. My neighbor will not go out on her balcony because of the fear. So the seeds are spilled around the edge and the little bird is pecking at them like a chicken peck peck peck and it slips underneath the railing peck peck peck and its little toes go right over the edge peck peck peck hop skippity peck peck peck and I'm standing five feet away so my angle of sight takes in the 70 or so foot drop with the little birdie bouncing along the edge like it doesn't even care one whit if it fell off the edge or not, courting disaster like that. It made me want to go BOO!

I hadn't seen that little girl's blog yet, although I was aware of it. I am delighted by the fact that the Korean lunch she also shared was accompanied by a pair of sleek, menacing stainless steel chopsticks. At my kids' school, they aren't even allowed to use plastic forks. They might attack someone, you know. A spork is every so much safer. I'm fairly sure that bringing a butter knife in a lunch sack would merit an immediate 'zero-tolerance for weapons on campus' expulsion.

In North Carolina, assault by pointing a weapon is a misdemeanor. You always get probation. There's no jail time. Firing two shots into the ground is, in my opinion, not as bad as pointing a weapon. And yet this guy got 20 years! Insane.

And check out who the prosecutor is. Nothing says evil like a prosecutor who has no sense of justice.

"Again, this is a guy who wants to criminalize the practice of a religion and openly “declare war” on a billion of its adherents, and he also thinks liberal Jews are “parasites” and blacks are genetically inferior to whites, and he is Andrew McCarthy’s “friend” and a National Review contributor. Yes."

Then I should clarify that he's the Salon writer, not the racist at National Review.

The latest racist at National Review is David Yerushalmi.

I guess the magazine will have to distance themselves from him soon, so there's a job opening for any racist writers out there who can do a better job of scrubbing up their histories and switching to a less overt style of hate at The Corner.

How many overt white nationalist racists have to be uncovered at one prominent conservative magazine before the right-wing blogosphere realizes it might be the editors of the National Review who have a problem and not the people exposing them?

Not sure what that has to do with MSNBC unfairly editing a Romney video. I agree it's a shame MSNBC decided to be a left-wing version of right-wing news media.

MadMan, I agree, Don't Blink is one of the scariest shows I've ever seen. The angels were much scarier than Daleks could ever be, don't you think.

Nightline last night led off with a Fast and Furious piece about cars. Do you think they are saturating the public mind with that old drivel so no one will pay attention when they have to talk about Holder?